


Black and White

by Zeleis



Category: Marvel
Genre: Blood and Violence, Crime Fighting, Enemies to Lovers, F/M, Femme Fatale, Fights, Gen, Heist, Not Beta Read, Not Spider-Man: Far From Home Mid-Credits Scene Compliant, Pre-Heist, Recommend tags in the comments, Sexual Content, Sexual Tension, Swearing, irregular updates
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-19
Updated: 2020-03-19
Packaged: 2021-03-01 05:27:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,708
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23219977
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zeleis/pseuds/Zeleis
Summary: It's been two years since London, and Peter finds himself entering his freshman year of college with high hopes of being successful both as a college student and as Spider-Man.Nothing's ever that easy, and Peter soon gets caught up in a deadly battle against a ruthless crime boss who'll stop at nothing to take over New York City, and in a strange game of cat and mouse with an enigmatic thief who seems to have less than pure intentions for him.Honestly? He's not sure who's more dangerous.
Relationships: Felicia Hardy/Peter Parker, Happy Hogan/May Parker (Spider-Man), Michelle Jones/Peter Parker
Comments: 6
Kudos: 8





	Black and White

**Author's Note:**

> PLEASE READ: I have decided not to use archive warnings for this fic. Read at your own risk.

It was a warm late summer night in New York City. Standing on the rooftop of a tall building overlooking her target, the thief could sense transition in the air. Life was almost ready to move into the next stage of its relentless cycle. The thief smiled. She, like all of of us, was beholden to the cyclical nature of the world. We are all born and then we grow and then we decline and then we die. But the funny thing about sentience is that we move beyond basic biological imperatives and apply cycles to our everyday lives, whether we know it or not. The process of a heist is a cycle that the thief is all too familiar with. She plans and then she steals and then she escapes and then she laughs; oh so delighted with the amount of fun she's having, living life the way she wants to.

But enough of the half baked philosophical ruminations. The thief was moving. Her target was a jewellery store in Manhattan. The name of the store? Unimportant. She's what's important. Clambering down over the ledge of the nondescript tall building she began on, the thief began to shimmy effortlessly along and between window ledges as she traversed downwards. It didn't take long for her feet to make contact with the hard floor of the target rooftop, and she immediately made her way over to the point of entry. The roof dipped down between two points and when she quietly landed in this gap she could see a small window. Peeking through the window she could make out the shadowy outlines of bathroom stalls. She smiled. How could a place with a take so valuable have such an exploitable flaw for someone like her?

Easy answer.

There aren't many people like her.

She shrugged her black backpack off her shoulders. Reaching inside she removed her glass cutter (always a favourite) and gently placed the suction pad on the window. Slowly, she pressed the arm of the cutter to the window and gently cut a circle into the glass. She pulled a hammer out of her bag. There were sensors throughout the building which monitored sound levels, and any egregious rise in decibels was sure to set the alarm off. So instead of banging the circle out of the glass, the thief pressed and walked the flat head of the hammer across the circular outline, prying the shape out of place without making too much noise. Once the circle was sufficiently loose, she gave a sharp tug on the glass cutter, freeing the circle from the window and leaving behind a small hole big enough for her gloved hand to slip through.

She slid her hand through the hole, before twisting it and beginning to search. Almost instantly, her fingers brushed against the window's latch and she grasped on and turned it before pulling the window outwards with her free hand. The window was now open. The thief returned her tools to her bag before climbing through. Most would have trouble fitting themselves through a window as small as this one, but her lithe body slipped through head and torso first with nary a snag. Placing her hands on a sink to her left, she brought her legs through the window and gently deposited herself on the tile floor. Her feet spread far apart to avoid a motion sensor directly under the sink. She was in.

She crept towards the bathroom door, taking measured strides to avoid triggering any sensors. She knew there was no night guard here, only an almost nauseating over-reliance on technology. Sound sensors, motion sensors and light sensors, all connected to an integrated alarm system which would go off in response to any unnatural deviations from the status quo. On top of that, there were cameras throughout the store, recording 24/7, operated in-house but with backups sent to an unknown location off-site. It would have been an interesting challenge under normal circumstances.

But technology can be circumvented.

Especially when there's no human presence to ensure things are running how they should be.

Especially when the cameras can be accessed remotely.

Especially when the alarm panel is in a room directly opposite the bathroom.

The thief grinned. _So fucking easy._

Removing a tension bar and a raking tool from her belt, she inserted them into the pin and tumbler lock of the bathroom door and began to pick. It didn't take long. The lock clicked and she knew she was free to open the door when she needed too. She pulled a phone out of her bag. Quickly navigating to the access page for the security cameras with the help of the IP address she'd snagged during her prep phase. Logging in, the thief had access to the feeds of all six security cameras throughout the store. She couldn't disable them completely from the web portal, but she could force a reboot, giving her exactly two minutes to get to the main control panel in the alarm room before they came back online. Looking at her watch, she set the timer and began the reboot. 

Two minutes remaining

She slowly pulled the bathroom door open, conscious that too sudden a move would trigger a motion sensor, before stepping out into the dark hall. She was operating on memory in the darkness, trusting her mind to guide her as she took a few steps forward before reaching out and brushing her hands against the alarm room door. She groped in the darkness for the door handle, before again picking the lock with ease.

One minute and thirty seconds remaining.

She opened the door to the alarm room and paused before producing a can of aerosol from her bag. She hadn't managed to get a complete image of the alarm room during her preparation so she needed to be careful. She gently sprayed the ground in front of her, revealing lasers flowing horizontally across the floor, spread apart in equal intervals. 

One minute and ten seconds remaining.

Raising her arms above her head, the thief swung her body into a handstand between two lasers before springing into a flip as she made her way into the room. Once, twice, three times she flipped before gracefully landing at the end of the room, past the lasers and in front of the main control panel.

Forty seconds remaining.

Quickly now, the thief pulled her signal jammer from her bag and activated it, keenly aware of the currently rebooting security camera aimed at her from its corner in the room. Mimicking the radio signals sent to the alarm from the sensors was key. If she could do it in time, then she'd be able to move about freely as the alarm system wouldn't be able to tell anything was wrong.

Thirty seconds remaining.

The jammer began to scan for the correct radio frequency to match the signals being sent and received by the alarm system.

Twenty seconds remaining.

_Come on._

Ten seconds remaining.

_Come on!_

The jammer vibrated, indicating it had found the correct frequency. It automatically overwhelmed the other radio signals as it began to communicate with the alarm, ensuring it was no longer a threat.

Five seconds remaining.

The thief tore open the camera control panel. She flicked her wrist, and sharp, cybernetic claws extended from her gloved hand. She slashed at the exposed wires, tearing them apart-

beepbeepbeepbeep

Her time was up. She looked up at the camera and smiled. It was completely dead! There was only one thing left to do.

She walked back out into the hallway and flicked on a light. She squinted at the sudden change before her eyes adjusted. In front of her was the bathroom, to her left up the hall lay the main floor and the display cabinets and to her right lay the room with her prize. She kicked the door clean open (no need for stealth now) and walked through, switching on a light as she did so. Before the thief were three safes, doubtless containing the general stock of the jewellery store when it wasn't in the display cabinets. She walked up to the first safe and pulled out a small robotic device. Safe crackers were normally large, cumbersome things which took hours upon hours to do what they were made for. However, this safecracker, like the woman holding it, was anything but normal. Once the machine's dialler was firmly affixed to the safe dial via the device's magnetic base, the thief pressed **DIAL** on its keypad and allowed it to get to work.

Thirty minutes passed before she heard the telltale click of a lock being opened. She opened the door and beheld what was inside: glistening gems and jewels sparkled up at her from their resting places. Were she cut from a different cloth she might have stood there and marvelled at them for hours. Instead, she pulled out her jewel bag and swept them inside. She removed her safecracker from the first safe and transferred it to the next, and then the next. When she was finished, her second bag was fit to burst. She shoved it inside her main backpack along with the safecracker and made her way back to the bathroom; collecting her signal jammer along the way.

Back out on the rooftop, the thief deactivated her signal jammer and closed the bathroom window she'd entered through. She'd done it, another heist completed without a hitch and with $200,000 worth of jewels in her possession. A grin split her features as she considered her take. Who knows what she'd do with it? Maybe she'd fence it? Maybe she'd wear some of it? Maybe she'd throw it all in the bay and be done with it? It didn't matter, she wasn't doing it for the jewels.

She walked towards the edge of the rooftop, grabbed her grappling hook from her belt and fired it off at another building across the street. She pressed a button and the motor in the handle began to turn, pulling her up into the air towards wherever the hook had landed.

Felicia Hardy laughed as she flew. No, she wasn't doing this for the jewels at all.

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome to my fic! I hope you enjoyed the prologue, I'm not sure it's very good but I just wanted to get the first part out there to encourage myself to write the rest of this story.
> 
> This is going to be based on my own interpretations of these characters, I can guarantee that I'm going to do things in this story with Peter that people are going to disagree with, just letting you know what to expect.
> 
> Updates are going to be irregular at best. I'm a university student who lacks motivation so updates will be infrequent. 
> 
> As for the prologue itself:
> 
> 1\. I hope you enjoyed the heist, there will be more of it to come. I'm by no means an expert on heist fiction or anything but I tried to blend some real world heist tactics and technology with some more comic book stuff (Felicia's claws being the prime example). I did watch a lot of heist films to try and get a sense of how these things go down in fiction and I did take inspiration from a particular film when writing this. Meaningless internet points if you can guess which one.
> 
> 2\. I'm aware it isn't very long. I'll put that mostly down to the complete lack of dialogue apart from the few lines of Felicia's interior monologue I threw in. Chapters in the future will be longer, I'm looking for around 3,000 per chapter as a good number.
> 
> 3\. We get introduced to Felicia here. As the tags suggest, she is going to be integral to the plot and she will likely have the second most chapters dedicated to her POV after Peter. 
> 
> 4\. I know that the Felicia pulling endless tools out of her bag of goodies might have felt very convenient for some. But do bare in mind that we've skipped the planning stage of this heist. Felicia would have assessed what she needed before the night and brought it with her.
> 
> 5.. I'll be representing a character's interior monologue throughout this fic in italics.
> 
> Finally: I would encourage comments and constructive feedback. I'm very interested in knowing when my narrative voice feels inconsistent and when my prose feels awkward and stilted. Any other feedback is also welcomed as long as it's constructive. I don't have a beta unfortunately.


End file.
